It’s now eight years since we last saw Mikaela Shiffrin on the podium at the Olympic Winter Games.
The U.S. Alpine skiing star won her most recent Olympic medal at PyeongChang 2018, when she claimed silver in the individual combined event.
After a medal-less Games in Beijing four years ago, Shiffrin narrowly missed the podium on her Milano Cortina 2026 debut in the women’s team combined event. She was unable to match teammate Breezy Johnson’s downhill performance, clocking the fourth-slowest time in the slalom run.
The 30-year-old from Colorado now has two chances to end her Olympic medal drought: the giant slalom and the slalom on 15 and 18 February, respectively.
“There’s no specific excuse, besides… I didn’t get my comfort level and I need to do in the next training days whatever I can to be able to get that comfort level for the next races,” she said after the team event, where she praised teammates Paula Moltzan and Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Wiles for winning bronze.
Shiffrin trained on the Col Druscié slope on both Thursday and Friday, practising slalom first and then GS the following day. On the same slope in 2021, she won three of her four medals at that year’s World Championships.
During the Games, however, the technical competitions will take place on the Tofane Ski Centre course: “The slope is actually quite simple,” Moltzan commented recently in an exclusive interview. “There’s no tricks, there’s no really steep section. It’s all very moderate terrain so it’s never feeling like you have a place to collect that much speed so you’re having to work for the speed a lot.”